„To promote the use of open content licenses, it is important to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of these licenses, as well as to gain insight into the practical advantages and inconveniences of their use. Moreover, given that the most widely used licenses, such as the GPL and the Creative Commons licenses, originate from the United States, it is also important to examine their validity and applicability from a European law perspective. This book assembles chapters written by renowned European scholars on a number of selected issues relating to open content licensing. It offers a comprehensive and objective study of the principles of open content from a European intellectual property law perspective and of their possible implementation in practice. To date, no other in-depth legal analysis has been carried out in Europe on the capacity of the open content licensing model – as a whole – to serve as an enabling factor in the dissemination and use of information.“

The collection goes back to the Academy Colloquium entitled ‘Open Content Licences: New Models for Accessing and Licensing Knowledge’, held in April 2006, organized by the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, in conjunction with Creative Commons Netherlands. Three additional chapters are adapted from studies carried out in recent years for Creative Commons Netherlands and made possible thanks to a subsidy from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

It includes contributions by Gerald Spindler, Séverine Dusollier, Till Kreutzer and Mireille van Eechoud. My essay is entitled „Towards a New Social Contract: Free-Licensing into the Knowledge Commons.“ A significantly extended version will be published shortly.

This is my presentation at the second Free Culture Forum on 29 October in Barcelona. You can watch the video recording (ogg, starting at 00:12:00), look at my slides (pdf) and read the slightly edited text here:

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Thanks for the invite. I am aware that my role, like that of Peter Jenner and Jamie Love, is to be a tomato-throwing target. I’m wearing red, so it’s not going to be problem for the laundry. Just one favour I’d like to ask from you: please watch out for my glasses.

Here is the short version of what I have been promoting for a number of years and what is now about to become a copyright bill in Brazil:

Legalizing file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access.

26. August 2010

On 4 July 2010, a new Internet video went viral. Hungrybear9562 was most literally blown away by a double rainbow he saw on 8 January 2010. So were YouTubers when the video hit, by both the rainbow he had recorded and by his ecstatic commentry. The video got 3,1 million hits in 8 days. It inspired dozens of re-enactments and re-mixes, and it crossed the threshold to mainstream media. Here’s the original: